In the summer of 1920, F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, three months married, decided to flee the ennui of the New England noon, and so they fired up their dilapidated car and embarked on a mock odyssey from Connecticut to Alabama to rediscover the "biscuits and peaches" of Zelda's youth. Documented in The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, their hapless but good-natured picaresque is punctuated by moments of comedy, despair and mortal peril, in which the car proves to be every bit as recalcitrant and impulsive as its passengers.

Engagingly introduced by Paul Theroux, this first UK edition of Fitzgerald's song of the road reflects a perennial American fascination with the automobile, and a personal interest in the space between fact and fiction. Many elements of the account are embellished for dramatic effect: in fact, the actual journey started from New York, and was conducted in a rather less ostentatious vehicle than the much-vaunted "Expenso".

But if Fitzgerald's style occasionally smacks of affectation, it also illustrates his subsequent development. Though he exhibits all the debonair ebullience befitting a young man in possession of a successful first novel and a spirited wife, beneath the patina of gaiety there are intimations of a deeper, more inscrutable tragedy. The couple are helped along their way by a young war veteran "still wearing part of his uniform" and bowl merrily across fields once stained with Confederate blood. On entering Montgomery, Zelda weeps "because things were the same and yet were not the same… for her faithlessness… and for the faithlessness of time". Though verging on mawkish, Fitzgerald's observation anticipates the deep romanticism that comes to maturity in Gatsby: the ambivalent attitude to the past; the desire, innate and imperfect, for not only the antebellum world, but the impossible future which Gatsby strains to see.